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Postings from October 2003
Folks,
Is it completely hairbrained to consider adding a new 'arg-list-scope',
which inside the arg-list of a function/method call, adds that namespace
(but only for that immediate context) to those that will be searched to
resolve the function-name ?
one place this might be helpful is using POSIX constants as arguments to
POSIX functions
it seems too Java-ish to have to say;
use POSIX();
$fd = POSIX::open($path, POSIX::O_CREAT | POSIX::O_EXCL |
POSIX::O_WRONLY, 0644);
now, we dont HAVE to do that :-), but folks who worry about symbol table
growth do.
It seems theres enough context inside the arglist to: skip the symbol
import, save the keystrokes,
do so at compile time (at least for above, where its not a method-call),
save the world, and knock off early.
It would be nice to specify this either on a per-function basis, or
perhaps on an entire class.
The former sounds like a method attribute (since Ive already asked for
compile-time :-)
sub POSIX::open
: uses_helpers
{...}
sub POSIX::O_CREATE
: constant, helper
{...}
I cant think of a good pragma name to specify this self-preferential
name-resolution,
so Ill just WAG:
use self_preference qw ( open close );
use self_help qw ( O_CREATE O_EXCL );
use self_help qw ( :fcntl_h :errno_h );
The mapping of O_WRONLY to POSIX::O_WRONLY should only be done if O_WRONLY
isnt already imported in, least suprise dictates that only undefined
symbols should be
resolved this way.
Taking this further, the uses_helpers attribute could accept args, which
would name the helper-class
(aka interface) where the helper functions would be found.
... but I have no idea how this might be implemented,
so I hope this appeals to someone with the tuits and the clues.
Id happily accept a few clues myself, but I wager the patch would be
less work
than explaining it to me.. :-O
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